[ZeroGravitas]

I don't think you'll be their customer much longer.

You could have been describing me. I got on the Mac bandwagon 10 years ago, when Mac OS X didn't work properly yet, and just recently got off.

Ubuntu is a better Unix desktop now. I laugh at the Ubuntu community arguing about their sleek new icons in the top bar. They're not quite consistent, use slightly different shades, some legacy ones are a different height from the rest. I remember reading the exact same arguments about the Mac OS X ones yet even the Linux guys assume the Mac is infallible in this regard. Any reader of Gruber should know otherwise.

There's pros and cons and everyone has their own use case but Ubuntu is gaining them, and the Mac is losing them as far as I can see (e.g. it seems like Ubunutu works better with iPods these days, crazy as that sounds, just by not implementing anti-features that stop you doing things like copying your music off). You know Ubuntu is going ship three upgrades in the next 18 months, whereas news has just come out that Apple has reduced the 10.7 team to a skeleton crew (which has happened repeatedly to other interesting projects within Apple) which means even its optimistic release date of 18 months is in doubt, as is how much they'll charge you for the upgrade.

I bought iPods because they were perfect for me and Apple were years ahead of the curve. They're not any more. I nearly bought an Apple TV, but if your life doesn't revolve around iTunes it doesn't make sense. I bought the iPhone, a bit more reluctantly, if I was going to carry a phone anyway, I might as well have one with a great browser, and they were a couple of years ahead of the competition. They're not anymore. I'm not going to bother with the iPad (or anything else Apple again) because they're not that far ahead of the competition and they won't be for long.

I don't need a pad, I want the same low-power ARM hardware plus a keyboard in a standard netbook form factor running Linux. If it's not got access to the "Apt" store, then I'm not interested.

[retro212]

Ubuntu will never get traction on desktop until video drivers at least show image on monitors. I've spent 3 days trying to install correct drivers for my graphic card, until I've finally gave up.

[ZeroGravitas]

I was talking about myself, the poster, and geeks in general rather than "the desktop" market. You'll notice I was using Mac OS X when it wasn't ready for the desktop either (and you could argue it never was if you look at global marketshare numbers). Drivers for hardware was their big issue too, something Linux still beats them for today if you compare the difficulty of building a hackintosh to building a Linux box.

However, if you can't even get an image to show with Ubuntu then you're doing something very wrong. Not taking advantage of all the features of the card without installing proprietary drivers (offered, but not forced on you, with a single click in Ubuntu), yes that's common. Not being able to view anything with a recent Ubuntu on a desktop machine is a very unusual situation.

[mapleoin]

On the other hand, what if I told you to use supported hardware? The same way you have to buy supported hardware for OS X.

[drivebyacct]

Ironically, Mac hardware has pretty impressive Linux support. Aside from some (admittedly very frustrating) touchpad issues, I have had great success with sleep, hibernate, wifi (once I replaced that trash nm-applet with wicd), nvidia, etc.